Terrorists aren't as dumb as people think they are
by digby
James Fallows points out something that should be obvious to anyone who's been halfway awake for the past decade:
Terrorist or criminal groups would not have to wait for the PRISM revelations to guess that cell phone traffic might give them away. All they would have to do is watch any American movie or TV show produced since about 1985. Half the action in the first few seasons of The Wire involved "burner phones"; think of 24, Breaking Bad, or any other depiction of groups trying to operate outside the authorities' view. Everything now known about Osama bin Laden's final off-the-grid years suggests his scrupulous awareness of the perils of leaving an electronic trail.
My point is not that crime drama is a perfect representation of reality, nor to set this reader up as a straw man, since he's provided a long stream of otherwise-astute observations. Rather I'm using his message to highlight one of the most striking aspects of the PRISM revelations: the unusual risk/reward balance in this latest large-scale leak.
He wonders why, in that case, this is a classified program at all. It's certainly reasonable to ask how the vaunted "balance" has been achieved when it's likely that the only "terrorists" it might be able to catch with this dragnet are some loner losers that are little different from an average criminal like the one who shot up Santa Monica College yesterday.
The question is, are we willing to pretty much give up our privacy to the whims of the national security state in order to catch the equivalent of street criminals (and even then, not necessarily all of them?) Why not give up the Bill of Rights completely --- we could undoubtedly do away with most crime of all kinds if we lived in a full-blown police state.
We'd feel very safe. From everything but the government.
But for all our talk about freedom and liberty and swinging our great big flag all over the place, there are an awful lot of people in this country who are very, very sure that they can give up their liberty in the abstract and it will never come back to haunt them. They think they can be completely protected from people who want to hurt them.
And that will never be possible no matter how much power we give the authorities. For instance, what about this?
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